Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  Sarah looked at me blankly. “I don’t understand anything you just said.”

  “Oh, crap. You weren’t there when we shook Mark down for information. Okay, look. You know how when you want to do something massive, you don’t keep it on a single computer?”

  “Well, yeah,” said Sarah. “SETI needs to be widely distributed or they wouldn’t have the processor power necessary to scan as much data as they’re receiving.”

  “That’s the problem with this equation! It’s too big for one brain, but no one knows that anymore. They won’t let it in. You’re the queen—”

  “I’m the what?”

  “—I think that means you have to direct the equation, but if you can just put some of the load elsewhere—”

  “Seriously, I’m the what?”

  “Sarah! Don’t argue with me about terminology! Just listen!” I grabbed her hands. “You need to break the mental connection. You need to throw me out of your head so that I can get Annie and James to ditch their anti-telepathy charms. And then you need to grab every brain you can get your mental hands on and use them like server banks.”

  Her eyes widened. “I couldn’t possibly—Artie, I wouldn’t have any idea how to do that, how to control it, how to keep myself from hurting you. I could mess up your memories, I could change your personality, I could . . . I could make it so that you’re not you anymore.”

  “Yeah, but the world would still be here. You’d still be here. And you wouldn’t be doing it on purpose.” I shrugged. “I trust you. I know if anything happens, it’s going to be because you couldn’t help it. This is the only way we walk out of this with Earth intact, okay? There’s not time to find another solution. I’m willing to take the risk. Are you?”

  Sarah bit her lip.

  Then, slowly, she nodded.

  “I think I love you,” she said.

  “I think I love you, too,” I said.

  She smiled, and everything went away.

  Twenty-five

  “The people who like to sling around words like ‘impossible’ never consulted with the universe on whether or not it cares.”

  —Thomas Price

  Iowa State University, in Ames, Iowa, about to try a really stupid way of saving the world

  THE CAMPUS SNAPPED BACK into focus around me, complete with furious cuckoos and the sound of screaming. Sarah sagged, her eyes still glowing lambent white. Lymph was continuing to trickle from her ears, nose, and eyes. I didn’t know how much longer she could deal with the weight of what she was trying to process.

  Could I have made things worse by forcing her to split her focus and talk to me? I didn’t know, and the question alone was enough to make me feel guilty. I turned, scanning the crowd. There: a flash of reddish-brown amongst the black-and-white bodies of the cuckoos. That was probably Antimony.

  One of the cuckoos fell screaming as their hair went up in flames. Yup. Definitely Antimony.

  I cupped my hands around my mouth so my voice would carry farther. “Annie!” I shouted. “I need you over here!”

  A gun went off. “Little busy!” she shouted back.

  “Don’t care!” We had a lot of code phrases for moments like this one, where we needed to communicate without tipping our hands. I elbowed a cuckoo in the face as he suddenly seemed to recognize me as a potential target, and yelled, “The fences are down!”

  A good Jurassic Park reference is universal. Annie swore, and then the commotion she and James had been merrily causing while I tried to get through to Sarah began to shift, moving toward us.

  “This is either the best idea I’ve ever had or the absolute stupidest,” I said. Another cuckoo came for me. I punched her in the throat. Cuckoos don’t have as many anatomical similarities with humans as they should, based on morphology alone, but lucky for me, they have larynxes. No one with a larynx enjoys being punched in the throat. That’s just science.

  The cuckoo went down, gurgling and gasping. That was good. There were six more cuckoos behind her, all aiming straight for me. That was bad. That was very, very bad. One of them had figured out that telepathic attacks weren’t working and had stopped long enough to pick up a chunk of concrete. That was even worse.

  He swung for my head. I dodged, but barely. “Leave my skull out of this,” I snapped, and kicked him in the groin.

  The screaming was getting closer. I hoped that meant Annie and James would be joining me soon. If they were here, I might be able to turn the tide from “probably fatal” to “eh, you’ll walk away from it.” Any combat you can walk away from is a good combat, regardless of what’s been done to the other guy.

  A cuckoo lunged for me. A burning hand grabbed her by the hair and yanked her backward before she could make contact. She screamed. The hand let go. The fire didn’t. The burning cuckoo fled into the crowd, carrying more chaos with her.

  “What the actual fuck, Artie?” demanded Annie, before kicking a cuckoo in the back of the knee and planting her foot between the fallen man’s shoulder blades. He tried to get up. She stomped, once. He stopped trying to get up.

  “I need you to take off your anti-telepathy charms.” I looked past her to James. “Both of you.”

  Their eyes widened in comically identical expressions of baffled dismay.

  “Uh, what?” asked Annie.

  “Please. There’s no time. We talk too much anyway. Trust me.”

  Annie took another precious second to stare at me before she nodded stiffly, reached into her front pocket, and pulled out the small glass vial of her personal protective charm. She dropped it. James, who might be confused, but still understood that sometimes it was better to follow instructions from the person who knew what was actually happening and ask penetrating questions later, did the same.

  James didn’t have our genetic resistance to telepathic influence. We needed to act quickly. I lunged forward and grabbed Annie’s wrist, gesturing for her to do the same with James.

  “Don’t freak out,” I said, and grabbed Sarah’s wrist with my free hand. “Sarah, now.”

  She turned her head, whiteout eyes focusing on me without seeming to actually focus. Her voice echoed inside my skull, saying, Brace yourselves.

  There wasn’t time to brace myself. There wasn’t time for anything. There was just the sudden, painful flood of numbers cascading over everything, washing the world away. Not into the comforting whiteness of her mindscape. No; that would have been too familiar, and consequentially, too kind. This was a shifting veil of figures, numbers and letters joined in an unending whirl, each one feeding into the next, none of them making any sense at all.

  Someone screamed. It might have been me.

  Hold on, said Sarah.

  I couldn’t hear Annie or James in the mental din: we’d been partitioned off from one another, which meant Sarah was using our brains exactly the way I’d suggested. We were her off-site processors, and she was spinning the pieces of the equation through us as quickly and as efficiently as she could.

  Not as quickly or efficiently as she needed to. The tide of numbers grew in both intensity and speed, until it felt like I was actually drowning. My vision blurred around the edges. I blinked hard, looking for clarity, and couldn’t find it. It was like the world was being fogged over, wiped away by something I barely had the tools to comprehend.

  Sarah, I thought—or tried to think. Her name glitched and shattered in my mind, becoming a series of numbers that were actually letters that were actually images, freeze-frame components of a universe my brain wasn’t equipped to hold.

  Hold on, she whispered, through everything that still remained around me, every shape and every shadow, every symbol dancing through the endless equation that unspooled through my cells like a disease. I’m going to try something.

  There was an almost electric jolt through the connection we shared. The equation lightened, lifte
d, and suddenly rebalanced itself, spreading out across every inch of surface I had and then spreading out to cover the surfaces around me. For the first time since the formation of our chain, I could feel Annie, burning bright and furious just outside the lines of my core. There was another presence beyond her, cold and calculating and confused: James. And beyond him . . .

  Mark?

  How’s it going, Lilu? Looks like I’m one of the good guys after all. The amusement in his mental voice was bright and clear and incredibly self-satisfied. You found the road. I’m happy to run down it. For Cici.

  Will you all be quiet? Sarah didn’t sound amused. Sarah sounded strained, like she was having trouble keeping things together. This is finicky work. If I mess it up, we’re losing Europe.

  Easy there, Dark Phoenix, said Annie. Take us in nice and gentle, and don’t destroy any continents.

  I’m try—

  That was as far as Sarah got. Her scream filled the world, and everything went white, then gray, and finally black, as the universe collapsed into nothing, and was still.

  Twenty-six

  “The fact that we call being kind, or considerate, or good ‘being human’ tells you something about how much of this planet we have under our thumbs.”

  —Jane Harrington-Price

  In the whiteness of the infinite void, finally finishing this

  THE CONNECTION BETWEEN ME and the others—my offsite processing systems, and bless Artie forever for suggesting I could even try to use their minds that way—snapped like a stalk of celery, crisp and clean and horrifyingly loud. I staggered backward, realizing as I did that I was back in the nothingness of my own mindscape. My lungs hurt, which seemed silly, since they weren’t real. I still struggled to breathe.

  “You bitch,” hissed a familiar voice.

  I raised my head just in time for Ingrid to slap me across the face. I yelped. She advanced, her eyes blazing white, her clothes streaked with pearlescent lymph.

  “All you had to do—all you had to do—was accept the gift any other cuckoo would have been willing to die for,” she spat, pulling her hand back to slap me again. “All you had to do was gaze on the glory of our ancestors and use it to steer a path toward our new home. Your job was so easy even a lobotomized child could do it.”

  She hit me again. It shouldn’t have hurt, but it did. I moaned, low and startled, as I pressed a hand against my cheek and stared at her.

  She looked like me. She looked exactly like me. More than Mom did, even, and we’d always looked so much alike that people had no trouble believing we were related. Ingrid was the mold from which I’d been struck.

  Three mothers. One who left me, one who lost me, and one who loved me. And now the first of them was back again, fury in her eyes as she drew back to deliver another blow.

  “I’ll have to start all over,” she said.

  My eyes flicked to her stomach, which strained against the limits of her clothing. Start all over. She meant abandon another baby with another human family. She meant leave another cuckoo child with no idea who they were supposed to be or how they were supposed to get there, exiled from their species, from everyone who should have known and loved and wanted them.

  “You can’t do that,” I said.

  “Yes, I can,” she replied. “It’s what we do. Or do you mean I can’t do to her what I did to you? Leave her with a hapless human couple and then, when she’s old enough to have imprinted, take them away and see what happens? You don’t think their deaths were an accident, do you, Sarah? That they just happened to lose control of their car when there was a suitable replacement family for you in range? The whole thing was planned. A queen must be nurtured.”

  “No,” I said.

  “And just look at you. Useless. Weak. Their sacrifice was for nothing. Not that it matters. There are always so many humans to go around.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “They’d still be alive if it weren’t for you.”

  “You bitch,” I snarled.

  She slapped me.

  I grabbed her wrist before she could pull her hand back, yanking her toward me. “No,” I repeated, and punched her in the jaw, the way Verity showed me, so my knuckles slammed into the space where her jawbone connected to itself. She made a startled noise of protest, trying to back away. I didn’t let go of her wrist.

  “You’re not going to do anything,” I said, and hit her again, and again, until she stopped trying to break away and started trying to claw at me instead, the fingers of her free hand seeking and failing to find purchase in the skin of my face. It was the feeble attempt of someone who had never been forced to fight for herself, and it would have been hilarious, if it hadn’t been so damn sad.

  “No.” This time when I hit her, she stopped trying to scratch me. “That baby isn’t a pawn. They aren’t a toy. You don’t get to decide what they’re going to be just because you give birth to them. You don’t get to force them.”

  “I get to do whatever I want,” she said, eyes glinting white.

  I paused.

  We were in my head. We were in my space, where everything was up to me; where I controlled the world. The equation was still nibbling at the edges of everything, filling my thoughts with numbers, but it wasn’t as bad as it had been before I offloaded a big chunk of it onto Artie and the others. I could think. I could plan.

  I could make decisions.

  “You called me a queen,” I said softly.

  Ingrid tried again to pull away from me. My hand around her wrist; the idea of my skin pressing against hers. Things have always been easier with skin contact.

  “I’d say I was sorry, except I’m not; not really,” I said. “I wish I could be sorry. I wish I could have all the regrets in the world. But you decided not to be my family, and that was your choice, and that means I’m choosing, here and now, not to be yours.”

  For the first time, there was true alarm in her expression. I wondered why it had taken me so long to realize that pulling people into this constructed mindscape would let me read their faces as easily as I read their thoughts. I could have been learning nuance and detail this whole time. Except maybe not. I couldn’t be sure—not with as little experience as I’d actually had at this—but it felt like the construct was taking a lot of power. Maybe I hadn’t been capable of doing this before . . .

  Well, before things changed.

  “I’ll make sure someone takes care of the baby,” I said as I gathered as much of the equation as I could hold in my mental hands and shoved it into her mind like a knife being shoved into a wound. I wasn’t careful about it. I wasn’t kind. I didn’t shunt the pieces of her that made her who she was to the side the way I had with the others.

  Ingrid screamed. But not for long. She sagged, no longer fighting me. I let go of her wrist. She collapsed to the ground.

  I opened my eyes.

  Artie, Annie, James, and Mark were standing in a rough circle around me, blocking out the cuckoos who were no longer fighting them, but were instead watching us warily, waiting to see what was going to happen next. That seemed odd—it would have been reasonable for the cuckoos to attack as soon as the others were distracted—until I noticed the bodies littering the ground, their eyes open and still blazing white. They must have touched me, or one of the people who were currently extensions of me, after I’d started offloading the equation. The physical contact would have pulled them into the loop.

  The same way I’d pulled Ingrid into the loop. She was on the ground directly in front of me, still twitching, burning white eyes turned upward to the sky. I wanted to feel bad about that. I couldn’t. I’d offloaded enough of the equation that I finally had room to spin it properly, to see all its lines and angles. The longer I looked at it, the more I started to understand what trying to complete it on my own would have done to me.

  The cuckoos who’d grabbed
me without going through the proper chain of metamorphosis and instar weren’t going to recover from the equation’s incursion into their minds. There wasn’t room for them, the history of our people, and the equation, and of those three things, the self was what the equation would be most inclined to treat as an invader. It was a living thing. It was hungry. It wanted to expand, to devour . . . and to be completed.

  No, I thought, and felt the equation curve and writhe, looking for places to sink its teeth into the chain, for breaks in the processing loop.

  I couldn’t hold it forever. I wasn’t even sure I could hold it long enough to do what needed to be done.

  Artie and the others were an echo in the back of my mind, a comforting hum of presence without awareness. There was no room left for awareness, not with the equation sucking up every spare neuron they had. Their core selves were still present, neatly bundled up and tucked away, but that wouldn’t be the case forever, not unless I hurried.

  Mark was in the most danger. Like the cuckoos who’d touched us without being invited in, he had the history alongside his self, and that meant he had less room for other information than the rest of us. Something was going to give.

  Mom—Angela—had been able to go into my head and remove the buried time bombs of cultural history before they had the chance to rupture and spread their poison across my thoughts. I could potentially do the same for him. Even as I thought about it, I knew how it could be done, what turns and tweaks I would need to make to clip those hereditary memories away from his core self and then excise them, freeing up more room for the equation to flourish. I could almost feel it panting with hungry glee at the idea, like all it wanted in the world was to spread.

  Equations shouldn’t want things. They shouldn’t be big enough or complicated enough to have opinions or desires. But that’s what people are, really. We’re equations that have grown large enough and complex enough to have opinions about the world. To want to change it.